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| US Taxpayers
Hit With The Bills Of Ebola 'Craziness' |
By Patricia
Doyle |
| Hello Jeff - As usual the ultimate person who will get
stuck with the bills for all of the Ebola quarantines in hospital
will be, who else? The US TAXPAYER. We continue to give out thousands of visas to people from West Africa and then the US taxpayer gets hit with the hospital bills, such as the case recently in Chicago, when a child came down with a simple fever and was hospitalized. The 'tourists' from W Africa are not asked to pay their own bills but rather, it is the taxpayer who picks up the tab which starts with up to $50,000 a day for the hospital room alone, not to mention doctors, lab fees, tests and MRIs, CT scans etc etc. If I went to a foreign country and took ill, I would be expected to pay the doctor bills and hospital bills. Many countries would require people to take out the Countries Health Insurance for the duration of the stay. I know Iceland requires people to take out an Icelandic policy that would cover people while in Iceland. Not the US, however, Africa has special privileges and does not have to have their people pay bills in the US, obviously. The taxpayers do that and then the taxpayers get hit with super high IRS bills as well to pay for the Ebola craziness. If we give out too many visas which thus gives us over 1,400 people in quarantine for Ebola for 21 days, it is time to stop the visas until Africa gets a handle on the outbreak. WE are sending supplies and manpower and billions of dollars to Africa therefore, lets give the taxpayer a break and ease up on the travel from W Africa to the US. Patty Costs Of Responding To Ebola Adding Up Liz Szabo - USA TODAY 11-25-14 The American public's initial response to the spread of Ebola to the USA was fear. Their next reaction may be sticker shock, especially if taxpayers are asked to pick up much of the tab. Treating an Ebola patient at U.S. hospitals costs $25,000 to $50,000 a day. While some hospitals say they will absorb that cost themselves, others are looking to Washington to reimburse them for expenses not covered by insurance. Omaha's Nebraska Medical Center still hasn't been reimbursed for the $1.16 million cost of caring for its first two Ebola patients, Richard Sacra and Ashoka Mukpo, said Jeffrey Gold, chancellor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. That figure doesn't include the $148,000 in revenue lost when nearby beds had to be closed off to accommodate a special Ebola isolation ward, Gold said. And the hospital incurred additional costs treating Sierra Leonean physician Martin Salia, who died last week, just 36 hours after his arrival in the USA. There's often a two- to four-week delay between when patients are treated and when hospitals are reimbursed by insurers, Gold said. Sacra was treated in September, and Mukpo was treated in October. In testimony before the House of Representatives last week, Gold asked Congress to reimburse hospitals for Ebola-related costs not covered by insurance. The Nebraska Medical Center is one of four hospitals in the USA with specially designed biocontainment units to handle dangerous germs such as Ebola. In Nebraska, the decision to accept Ebola patients is made by the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services. If that department agrees to take a patient, Gold said his hospital is expected to accept patients with Ebola, as long as staff feel the facility can do so safely. His hospital has never asked about money before agreeing to accept an Ebola patient, Gold said. But given the high cost, "At some point, we will need to address it," he said. Caring for Dallas nurse Nina Pham, who spent just more than a week at the National Institute of Health's Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md., cost $50,000 a day, spokeswoman Molly Hooven said. Patients at NIH are not charged for their care, because they are considered to be participants in clinical trials. Patient care is paid for through the NIH budget. New York's Bellevue Hospital, Atlanta's Emory University Hospital and Dallas' Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital have not said how much it cost them to treat Ebola. Pham spent the first few days after diagnosis at Texas Health, which also provided the first few days of care for nurse Amber Vinson, who went to Emory, and all of the Ebola-related care for Liberian national Thomas Eric Duncan. Texas Health is not charging any of those patients for their care, spokeswoman Candace White said. Ebola costs hospitals far more than most other care. A heart transplant — one of the most expensive procedures — costs the hospital about $270,000, Gold said. Yet hospital costs are modest compared with the $20 million that Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., is asking Washington to pay to reimburse New York City for caring for a single Ebola patient, monitoring his contacts and keeping track of hundreds of travelers from West Africa. Schumer's request is more than the $14.6 million earmarked for the entire state of New York in President Obama's emergency funding request of $6.2 billion in Ebola-related expenses. Congress has not yet approved Obama's request. Schumer compared Ebola to a natural disaster, whose costs are often subsidized by the federal government. "The world-class response mounted by New York City and Bellevue (Hospital) was not free, and the bottom line is local communities and local taxpayers should not foot the whole bill for handling an infectious disease that is a threat to the whole nation," Schumer said. The final bill for Ebola will surely be massive, given the enormous mobilization of government agencies. • U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been screening air travelers from West Africa for fever or other symptoms of Ebola. Spokeswoman Jennifer Evanitsky said the agency has used its regular budget to provide those services, but didn't disclose the exact cost. • Local health departments are monitoring passengers whose travels originated in West Africa. Health departments monitored the contacts of the four Ebola patients diagnosed in the USA — Duncan, Pham, Vinson and physician Craig Spencer of New York. None of those contacts became sick. New York's monitoring costs are included in Schumer's request. Dallas County Health and Human Services used salaried employees to monitor contacts and didn't spend any extra money, other than $1,800 in mileage costs, said Melanie Barton, assistant district attorney in Dallas County. • The Department of Defense — which had spent nearly $200 million fighting Ebola in Liberia as of Nov. 12 — will quarantine 3,000 troops returning from West Africa for 21 days, cutting into their work time and productivity. While many Ebola-related costs are essential, public health experts say that other efforts have been unnecessary, driven by the country's emotion-fueled over-reaction to a small number of cases. But an "abundance of caution" — the rationale cited for some Ebola policies — can lead to an abundance of expenses, said Robert Murphy, director of the Center for Global Health at Chicago's Northwestern University. It was unnecessary to quarantine nurse Kaci Hickox at University Hospital in Newark, N.J., and in her home in Maine, Murphy said, because she never had a fever or Ebola symptoms. "I don't think the American public should have to pick up the tab for craziness," Murphy said. Other responses to Ebola may have costs that are hard to measure. Schools in Texas and Ohio temporarily shut down in October after learning that staff members or students may have traveled on the same airplane or same flight as Vinson. "The public has been clamoring for near-zero risk, forcing the public health system to go way beyond what science and common sense requires," said Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of the O'Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law at Georgetown. "We really have overreacted, and it's cost us a lot of money." Some Ebola-related expenses will be borne by patients' employers and insurance policies. Samaritan's Purse, the missionary agency for which physician Kent Brantly was working while serving in Liberia, paid for his transport to the USA and also provides his health insurance, a spokeswoman said. Salia's family paid for his transport, as well. Gostin predicts more states will ask Washington to help pay Ebola-related expenses. He notes that the CDC's budget took a 10% hit from 2012 to 2013, and many state and local public health agencies have fared even worse. Local health departments just don't have a lot of staff to monitor health workers returning from Africa. "You can't have it both ways: You can't insist on heroic measures and then refuse to pay for them," Gostin said. "Congress is going to have to appropriate more money." Outbreaks are always expensive. And Murphy notes that the money spent on Ebola so far is "peanuts" compared with the price of even a "mini-epidemic." That's why fighting the disease in Africa is so important, said Stephen Morse, a professor at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health in New York, who studies biosecurity and pandemics. But much of the indirect cost of outbreaks is due to fear, rather than reality, said Jim Yong Kim, World Bank president, in a September speech about the epidemic in West Africa. From 2002 to 2004, SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, infected about 8,000, killing 800, and caused more than $40 billion in economic losses. But 80% to 90% of those losses came from "fear and aversion" — when people canceled flights and hotel stays in cities affected by the virus, for example — rather than medical costs. The World Bank has said that the Ebola outbreak could cost sub-Saharan Africa $3 billion to $4 billion. Ebola has infected 15,351 and killed 5,459, mostly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, according to the World Bank. In the USA, 10 patients have been treated, and two have died. All eight Americans survived. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/25/ebola-costs-add-up/19346913/ |
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